The Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) in cooperation with the Electronic Industries Association (EIA) developed a proposed standard for Category 5 components, wherein the transmission requirements of such components are characterized up to 100 MHZ and are typically intended for energizing applications with transmission rates up to 100 Mbps. Furthermore, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) adopted certain architectural standards with respect to electrical connectors utilized in the telecommunications industry so as to provide standard intermatability. The connectors that are most commonly utilized are FCC type modular plugs and jacks. The plug is commonly terminated to a plurality of wires which may be connected to a telephone handset or other communication device. The corresponding jack is commonly mounted to a panel or printed circuit board which in turn is connected to a telecommunication network.
Two important test parameters for high performance data transmission, i.e., Category 5, are Attenuation and Near-End Cross-Talk (NEXT) Loss. Near-end crosstalk loss may be defined as a measure of signal coupling from one circuit to another within a connector and it is derived from swept frequency voltage measurements on short lengths of 100-ohm twisted pair wire test leads terminated to the connector under text. NEXT loss is the way of describing the effects of signal coupling causing portions of the signal on one pair to appear on another pair as unwanted noise.
There have been numerous modular jacks meeting FCC architectural standards which have been proposed to reduce crosstalk within a modular jack. One of the latest is U.S. Pat. No. 5,674,093 to Vaden, which is incorporated herein by reference. While the approaches forwarded by Vaden and others to reduce crosstalk have significantly reduced signal coupling, and have met with some commercial success, there remains a need to further reduce the capacitance and mutual inductance between the pairs, thereby enhancing the performance of standardized modular connectors as frequencies increase, while still reducing costs and increasing reliability and ease of manufacture.